The Zeitgeist atDaily Kos is so annoying right now that I can’t stand to read it. Yet another iteration of Chicken-Littling about “OBAMA SELLING US OUT OMG OMG OMG OMFG!!!!!!!” Just like all the previous times…when, in the end, it has turned out he’s done nothing of the kind.

Markos himself has posted the same nonsense (here is one example diary—he’s posted about five of them in recent days). Maybe he’s just stirring up the pushback, but the language he is using about what a lousy negotiator Obama is—which flies in the face of history—is personal, insulting, and highly emotional. Also, baseless: it flogs a narrative that can only be considered true if you think failure to screech purist talking points while eating the Republicans’ lunch in policy face-offs is “weak”.

If you don’t think so, cast your eye back to the Republicans’ attempted hostage-taking of the debt ceiling in summer 2011.

Remember that one? Where the same Chicken Littles were screeching about “Obama slashing Medicare and Social Security”, because he’s a corporatist closet Republican blah blah yawn?

Remember the actual outcome? The actual outcome was to throw the deficit question to a commission which 1) everyone knew would fail to reach an agreement; 2) did, indeed, fail to reach an agreement; and 3) therefore, resulted in these impending sequester cuts which exempt Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, while balancing fully half of the cuts on the military…and don’t take place until after the Bush tax cuts expire, leaving all the leverage to whoever won the 2012 election.

In other words, understanding that anything he would have wanted would be dismantled under a Republican President anyway, Obama made the relatively safe bet that he would have a second term, protected the very things the Chicken Littles were certain he was destroying, and handed the GOP a live grenade with no pin and an achingly strong handle spring.

So that brings us to today. The current face-off’s necessary outcomes include

Raising the debt ceiling, so the US doesn’t default on its credit (credit extended by act of CONGRESS, it bears saying…not by the President);

Extending unemployment insurance benefits for millions who will lose them next week;

Doing some kind of deal on the deficit that avoids the draconian cuts to both military and social spending which will happen under the sequester deal unless such a deal is made. That means raising revenue, cutting spending, or both.

This isn’t just a battle over policies. It’s a battle over who gets to own “reasonable” in the eyes of voters, with the 2014 midterm elections hanging in the balance. Context includes the coming sequester and the sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts. So as of Jan. 1, taxes will go up on everyone by quite a bit…improving the revenue situation a lot, but also blowing a hole in our economy, which is still floating barely above the waterline as it is.

Oh…and the election for Speaker of the House happens on Jan. 3.

That election is Boehner’s top priority, make no mistake. And he can’t possibly get a bill with NO expenditure cutting through his caucus–if he tries he’ll either lose that election or win it so narrowly as to become even weaker than he is now. The President has insisted that taxes must rise on the wealthy–his position during the campaign was all incomes above $250K, but he recently offered to reduce that to $400K, and cuts including changing the COLA for Social Security to a chained CPI system, which is actually a more accurate way of estimating cost of living increases, but liberals are squawking about it because it is less generous than the current system.

Obama’s offer includes the requirement that the debt ceiling be raised and unemployment benefits extended as a part of the deal (read: “no more hostage-taking. Ever.”), and that interest payment savings to taxpayers by reducing the deficit through sunsetting the tax cuts on the wealthy be counted as part of the “cuts” side of the equation, which means nearly $300 billion less in actual cutting of expenditures. It also includes a permanent solution to the annual “doc fix”, which, if you don’t know what that is, you can go look up, as it’s a tangent to this post.

Boehner’s knee-jerk reaction to this was to declare a “Plan B” in which he proposed restoring Bush tax cuts for all incomes under $1 MILLION, and nothing else. The White House promptly said it would veto that, and Boehner doubled down, bringing it to a vote today even though he knows it’s doomed. It’s an empty gesture trying to make Democrats oppose a tax cut, but nobody is buying it. No matter what the outcome, Boehner loses.

Isn’t it obvious what’s going on here? Obama has Boehner on a limb, and he is steadily sawing it off.

A time-honored, ruthlessly effective political negotiating technique is to make an offer you know your opponent can’t possibly accept, but which appears to go much farther than s/he had any right to expect in the first place. If the offer appears to appall your supporters, so much the better…clearly, then, you must be trying really hard to find common ground. And then when your opponent refuses this offer, because you’ve poisoned it enough to make that inevitable…guess who’s the asshole?

Saying that “everything should be on the table” is positioning language, people. It doesn’t mean what it says. Anyone paying the slightest attention knows that. Eliminating the Department of Health and Human Services isn’t on the table. Eliminating the Navy isn’t on the table. Nationalizing the oil industry isn’t on the table.

I mean, c’mon. Take a break from your drama binge for a minute and think, for god’s sake. Boehner does have some leverage. He can prevent unemployment benefits from extending, and we really need for that to happen. Obama wants some infrastructure investments, too. He is going to have to give Boehner something for those, and it may come in the form of backing off somewhat from the $250,000 ceiling for restoring the tax cuts, and some expenditure cuts. I wish it weren’t so, but the Republicans hold the House. That’s just reality.

That said, I’d say it’s pretty much guaranteed that beneficiaries of social safety net programs are not going to see their benefits reduced by whatever comes out of this deal. They may, it’s true, see benefit increases slow a tiny bit, but by no reasonable definition does that constitute a cut.

Medicare benefits won’t be cut. Social Security benefits won’t be cut. Funding for the Obamacare programs won’t be cut. Medicaid won’t be cut. Unemployment will be extended and the middle class tax cuts will persist, enabling the economy to continue to warm. You can take that to the bank.

The guy you’re smearing has your back. Maybe you can lay off the hyperbolic tarbrushing until there is an actual outcome you can assess, instead of forming up the circular firing squad again. Sheesh.

Here’s what I know about the conspiracy theories that “both candidates are controlled by the same Powers”, or that the elections will be stolen through mysterious machine tampering: to the people who embrace them, they are both pleasurable and comforting.

Pleasurable, because they are self-congratulatory: “I’m too smart to be fooled. I know what’s REALLY going on.” Nice stroke to the old ego.

But more insidiously, they are comforting because they absolve their supporters of any responsibility.

If it’s all determined by corrupt conspiracies beyond our control, well, then, we don’t have to feel responsible for the outcomes, do we? And we don’t have to bother to make an effort to get out the vote…or even bother to vote ourselves.

So convenient. Their hands are clean, you see?

That self-congratulation is misplaced, and the excuse-making scurry from responsibility is cowardice. A lot of people have died to be able to vote, and once they could, things changed. You think we’d have Title IX if women never got the vote? Anti-discrimination laws if black people had never been able to vote? Regulations on polluters, if only the “corporate powers” really had any influence?

That storyline is a weak set of excuses, and it needs to stop.

Our system is far from perfect, but our votes DO determine who serves in office. And those people DO make the decisions about issues like those I listed.

Those who hope for equality, justice, and curbing the excesses of power and private interest in the name of the public interest have always been the underdogs. Honestly, they always will be—though there is a lot we can do to improve the system, starting with getting rid of Citizens United.

Corporate power and the influence of the wealthy is, and always will be.

But the idea that we can’t do anything at all—that elections are a charade, so we shouldn’t bother with anything but empty gestures—is a sorry way for the people of this time to avoid their turn to shoulder the banners of the suffragettes, of John Brown and WEB DuBois and MLK and Joe Hill and Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs, of Rachel Carson and David Brower, of the women who led the garment workers’ strikes in NYC and the miners of Ludlow and Matewan, of Chavez and Milk.

It’s a sorry set of self-congratulating excuses, and I have no patience for it. Too many have died over too many years to bring about too much progress for those who inherited all their advances to throw them away through laziness and self-satisfaction. It’s wrong, and it needs to be called out.

Smugness is the farthest thing from what you should be feeling if you buy into this crap. Quit kidding yourself. Get down from your high horse, stop telling yourself how smart you are for “seeing behind the curtain”, and do the work of being a member of this society.